We are happy to release Xsemble 3.1. It can be downloaded from the Get Started page now. It features the following incremental changes over release 3.0.

Jakarta EE Support

Jakarta EE is the new avatar of the former Java EE specifications, after Oracle handed it over to the Eclipse Foundation. Any further development will therefore happen on Jakarta EE, and therefore the support of Jakarta EE is important to Xsemble users, to benefit from future technology growth.

Our new release 3.1 adds support to Jakarta EE specification. Specifically,

  1. It adds a new platform Jakarta EE in addition to Java EE that existed. So the existing Xsemble applications keep working with Java EE.
  2. You can also select “Jakarta EE” as the technology for the Page and Entry Point components, in addition to “Java EE”. For now, the Page components with either technology are supported on either platforms. However, the Entry Points are not compatible with another platform. Thus, an entry point created with Java EE technology is not directly usable on Jakarta EE platform.
  3. A migration script (using bash) that can migrate the Java EE workspaces to Jakarta EE is now supplied. (The main issue is to change the package names from javax to jakarta; but the platform also needs to be changed in the layers.)
  4. The Java EE platform is now deprecated, which means that it is marked for removal in the future.
  5. Demo1 workspace application (supplied with Xsemble) has been retrofitted to showcase the new platform. The “Demo1.Hello” project continues to be a Java EE project, but in addition a new “Demo1.Hello JakartaEE” project that works on Jakarta EE layers is now added. The Entry Point component needed a new “Jakarta EE” implementation to be added for this.

Other Changes

UI Improvements

Some minor UI improvements were applied to the graphs, including the fontface. We hope that the users like the new look.

Deployment Directory Setting

The deployment directory specified as a project properties was a bad design. It resulted in different team members each having to maintain their own project.json file changed locally (over the one that is version controlled). So, now that user-specific setting moves to the xsemble.properties file (along with other user-specific settings). For the Jakarta EE and Java EE platforms, you now specify the deployment directory in your xsemble.properties file by adding following settings to your xsemble.properties file:

  • JAKARTAEE_DEPLOYMENT_DIR for Jakarta EE
  • JAVAEE_DEPLOYMENT_DIR for Java EE

Restart Xsemble for these settings to take effect.